When Dexter Munro (Baxter) and his new wife Juliet (Sally Smith) get married, they decide to escape Juliet's meddling father (James Robertson Justice) by buying a rundown cottage and doing it up themselves. But when the cottage proves to be more ramshackle than they thought, and the scale of the repairs needed far out of their budget, the newlyweds are forced into calling on Juliet's father after all. Before long he's employed incompetent builder Josh Wicks (Ronnie Barker), and the situation goes from bad to worse.